


Retribution red

by Artemis_Crimson



Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: Character Death, Gen, The Red War (Destiny), based on that lore bit where someone dies and is rez'd in the red war, lots of dying and a description of it so y'know if that's not your thing, this isn't actually any of my in game guardians
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-14
Updated: 2020-01-14
Packaged: 2021-02-25 17:35:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 831
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22260091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Artemis_Crimson/pseuds/Artemis_Crimson
Summary: In which there are small heroes
Kudos: 1





	Retribution red

Maya is nothing in her first life. She works an extra shift every day so her little sister can take this year to study cryptarchy and live closer to the walls. She walks to work and fixes the sweeping frame each morning at dawn.  
Organizes bolts of fabric in the window and the heavier armour weaves in the back.  
Puts on a kettle, fills a pot with a tea made from a cold weather mushroom and mint leaves.  
Helps customers and heads back home before the evening. Repeats it and takes her Thursdays off.

The Red War comes on an average Tuesday. She starts her day like any other.  
The rain puts her in a pleasant mood, snapping up a fuchsia umbrella with a gaudy gold tassel on its handle to keep her dry.  
She waves politely to her neighbour Ilos-17, an old Exo who does nothing but try and fail to sleep.  
She waves cheerfully to Verity the baker, who she swaps ribbons for bread rolls with now and then. She thinks she'll pick something pink to stand out against the blue of her next time.  
Maya kicks off her rainboots in the back room. Takes her pair of warm slippers from the break room/armour closet in the back. Puts on her kettle. Welcomes a couple looking for quilting supplies with her mug in her hands. While they browse she looks out at the Tower fondly, giving her a perfect view of the blast which shreds it.

The world is in a panic. Ships slip from the cloudcover she’d enjoyed only a moment ago and pods of geometric metal crash to the ground revealing caches of alien soldiers. Maya panics right along with the rest of it. She darts to the back room and grabs three heavy bolts of dull grey fabric. She tosses them at her customers, tells them frantically she doesn’t know when the Guardians will clear the invaders out and that they need to hide now. She doesn’t know that one of them helps run power lines through the underwork of the city.  
That there’s a duct an alley away, that they’ll take their partner through them to the wilds and their cloaks will help survive the cold and searching eyes. She doesn’t know they’ll be lucky. Or that she could have lived if she fled out the back with them.  
All Maya knows is a pod has crashed outside her display window. That she’s got a door hidden behind a shelf facing the other way and a chance to delay the tall red things smashing their way in. She measures her life against time it might buy, prays to the Traveler that her sister is safe and will stay so. She hisses at them to go.

* * *

Maya, last name of no consequence smashed a hot kettle over a Psion's horned helmet and ran into the street to draw it out. She had planned to try and loose it in the streets if she could.  
If she had made it a little farther away she would have found the bakery burning down, Verity inside. Maybe she could have rescued her.  
A little further still and her neighbour would have protected her, a heavy dark age rifle finding home in her practiced old hands once more.  
But Maya did not make it more than ten steps down her street, with steaming mad Psion at her heels because she met a quick end at the sharp one of a Cabal shield. Which is to say once she was thrown to the ground by their partner she was decapitated by the fortification field.

Around her body the city falls. Civilians evacuate. The legion settles in their airborne bases and the streets. Their occupancy is relatively short, all things considered but time is not kind to a corpse.  
Then the guardian who’ll later be given the name Hero, to stand among the many others they bare and Ghaul’s own meddling wake the Traveler. The Legion doesn’t know they’re dead yet but the Ghosts hiding about do, they search among the newly dead and the old lost.  
One finds what’s left of her.

When she wakes up she’s full of a protectiveness buried under a rage so deep and consuming it bleeds into her version. A little metal star is talking to her, apologizing. She doesn’t care for its hasty words of “I’m sorry” or “I finally found you and they need help.” She cares that the red in her vision is not just her anger but the standard of a strange, giant people who are ruining what she knows bone deep is her home.  
She has no armour, no weapons, no name. She clenches her fists. She doesn’t know what the Light is but electricity rains off her when she lunges for the biggest soldier she can see. She tears him apart barehanded. Oil dripping down her wrists, crackling with rage, she snarls at the rest to come for her.

**Author's Note:**

> The sister and the exo neighbour are fine and gonna find her I think


End file.
